History Repeating
by 1shot
Summary: It's all been done before. A study of two brothers; rating for language, gore, mild sexual imagery. Spoilers to 2.22.


HISTORY REPEATING

I.

_Romulus and Remus had bones forged of iron and fire,  
>but the first squalls of their innocence were colicky as any babe's.<br>They were suckled at the teats of a she-wolf, and from her breast  
>they knew the taste of savagery.<em>

"Come to me," says Katherine, and the part of Stefan that wants to refuse is drowning; he is forgotten and screaming in the blackness of her eyes.

The blood runs along her collarbone, pooling briefly in the hollow of her throat before it trickles downward. Stefan's jaw works, rigid, but he cannot stop the way he leans forward. His hands are on her arms; his tongue runs across his lower lip. His body betrays him.

_Our Father_, he tries, wildly, _Who art _– but the words won't come.

"Drink," whispers Katherine, "and forget." Her teeth are white and sharp – the succubus smile of the demon he'd once thought was a girl.

A creak sounds in the black hall outside the room. For one brilliant instant, Stefan thinks, _Damon,_ and hope is a bird trapped in his chest.

Katherine touches his hair, draws him down. She is surprisingly gentle.

He fastens his lips to her cool, wounded skin, and sucks. His throat works and works, and he cannot stop. It tastes like home.

.

"I will not deceive you, Damon," says Katherine, as she always does, and the part of Damon that wants to quail – at her casual self-cruelty, at the sharp pin and the blood that mars her throat – is lost in the warmth of her gaze. He forgives her small monstrosities.

"Don't tell my brother," he whispers. He trails a kiss across her palm.

She laughs; he knew she would. "Back to that again. Still? Really? May I not have you both?"

He knows she's teasing – knows she is his forever – but he grimaces against her hand. "Stefan Tag-a-long," he mutters. "Stefan the favourite. There are some things... there is _one thing_... I will not share."

"I'm yours," Katherine breathes, "I'm yours, I'm yours –" and her voice catches, because his kneading fingers have slid beneath her shift.

"Yes," Damon purrs, and he presses against her, laps away the crimson-copper stain. It is scorching and raw; he forces a swallow, voices no protest. He is breathing in the spiced scent of her hair.

II.

_Proteus and Acrisius were bound before birth, in the tight dark space before  
>the world grew bright and loud. Feet kicking, hands wrapped around<br>umbilical cords, they fought when they were half-formed.  
>They fought before they were even old enough to understand.<em>

Stefan is drunk on his father's blood. He did not know the beat of a heart could be so loud. The memory of death's silence is washed away in the flood that suffuses him.

The servant girl's pulse is drumming and fast, but Stefan can hear it falter. He can hear Damon drink, each desperate swallow, each tiny lick and groan. He feels like a proud parent. "I am so glad," he smiles, "that you like my gift."

But Damon doesn't say anything – Damon is busy – so Stefan steps back and whirls, arms outstretched. Each individual star is a diamond above. The wind tastes of sage, and the girl's dying terror.

Damon chokes, "No," then, but it's too late – the girl's body has acquired an irretrievable limpness. Her pulse staggers; one beat, a stuttering second, and then there is only the gurgle of her final exhale. Damon drops her before the stench of her loosened bowels soaks her skirts; he stares down. His eyes are wide and the stains on his chin are clotted and dark.

Stefan stops turning. "It's all right," he says, earnest. "It doesn't matter."

"It –" starts Damon, but Stefan isn't listening.

"Can you feel it? Can you feel the whole world changing?"

"We can't be this."

"Listen. Hear the forest. Hear every leaf. Damon, we can go anywhere. We can do anything._ Forever._"

Stefan doesn't understand why his brother is looking at him like that.

"Katherine's gone," says Damon, blankly, and not for the first time. "What's the _point?_" He wipes at the blood on his chin, ineffectual; he flexes his fingers, and swallows.

"_Katherine_," Stefan enunciates every syllable, "can rot in hell. And you can lick your fingers, brother." He flashes a grin; he is madcap, he is all-powerful, his teeth are razored and long. "We have each other."

III.

_Atlas said to his brother, "I am king here, and your elder,"  
>but Gadeiros said, "No." He called his people forth, and in the battle<br>there were gouts of crimson, and many cries of fury. So did a great kingdom fall into the sea._

Damon grows tired of the mess. "Can we not just go?" The irritation is not entirely hidden in his voice; he nudges a booted toe against the entrails on the floor.

Stefan is occupied; Stefan lifts a slim severed hand, caressing its long joints. He toys with the gold ring that still circles the dead woman's third finger; he raises the back of the hand to his lips, like some mockery of courtship, but it is only to lick the drying blood from her knuckles. "I'm sorry," he croons; he places the hand beside the wrist he tore it from, re-aligning the bone. "I've ruined all your beauty."

"She's dead," says Damon, impatiently. "She hardly cares." The woman's husband lies drained but whole across the bed, staring at the ceiling, eyes already going milky. A piece of his wife's thigh stains his white shirt like a slab of bleeding ham, before Stefan retrieves it.

"I care." Stefan's tone is smoothly sorrowing. "Look at how she fits together. All those clean young lines." He's sliding the chunk of thigh under the ruins of his victim's skirts.

"Some of us," notes Damon, "can eat without destroying the room." He gestures toward the dead man, more sharply than he'd intended – but the carpet reeks of shit and gore and he is no longer hungry. "If you'd show a little self-control..."

Stefan makes a sound like a growling dog; he looks up from where he crouches over tattered petticoats. "If you'd wanted to stop this," he snarls, "you could have." His eyes are baleful and empty as a wolf's.

(Stefan's face is scarlet-smeared. Damon sees a boy's smile – a bright laugh, a chin full of red jam, a ruffle of sandy hair. _I want to come too, Damon, please, can I? _He sees a skinned knee, a thrown ball.)

Damon opens his mouth to protest, and finds himself wordless.

Stefan has already lowered his attention back to his task. He presses a torn button carefully back into place, but his boot knocks the woman's hand loose again. The slender fingertip grinds beneath his heel.

IV.

_When the struggle between them became too great,  
>Ocno's heart grew heavy and hard in his chest.<br>He took his army and rode away from Auleste's city; he sought a land of his own._

"You can't choose what you feel," Lexi tells him. "You have to let it all back in."

But Stefan doesn't hear her, and he doesn't understand, because the blood is bright and singing in his throat and he does not want to be some weak and mewling prey.

It takes him three days to notice his brother is gone.

Lexi takes all his fun away. She locks him in the shrieking dark; she feeds him on dogs and cold raw pig. When he strikes her, she shoves him into the wall and snaps the chains around him.

Then she recites poetry. "John Donne," she says, cheerfully. "You'll like it." He doesn't, but when he's hurled himself forward until his wrists tear, she switches to Shakespeare.

"In sooth, I know not why I am so sad," murmurs Lexi, to the faceless brick. Nights go by and Stefan shakes and wails. His guts turn on him like wriggling rats.

When he sees his father's eyes before him – when he cries the names of servants and lost children – Lexi rocks him until he buries his face in the lace of her collar.

"It's all right," she whispers, but he chokes, "Damon," and she has no answer for that at all.

He cannot trust himself. She does not let him go.

.

"We're at irreparable odds," Damon tells Lexi; and, "Help him." He can give no other voice to it. He walks out the door.

The town assaults his senses: a merchant's laughter is shrill and forced; a child wails in hunger; the smoke of nearby battle drifts on the wind.

Behind him looms the house, full of emptiness and death.

He takes a horse – "Give me your horse," he says. A simple thing. He has only to slide the reins from a man's limp and well-gloved fingers.

He rides the beast until it founders. When it lies steaming and gasping in the road, bloody foam bubbling at the corners of its mouth, Damon stares down and feels nothing.

It is easy, he is discovering, to feel nothing.

So he walks (a mile away, he hears the horse die), and he walks, until he finds himself in some festering village with a run-down hotel and a girl whose hair is not dark enough. She is missing a tooth. He commands her not to smile.

"You seem down," she tells him, and he says, "You have no idea," but he lets her put her hand down his trousers anyway.

He takes a bottle of scotch in one hand, and the girl in the other, and he drinks.

V.

_Thor walked in thunder, power leashed, and the storm  
>behind his eyes had abated. He would know no peace;<br>in his shadow, the Trickster Loki stalked like a hound._

The world becomes a strange place when Stefan isn't looking.

It isn't that he's completely unaware – he wears jeans and a hoodie, he knows about rock and roll and MP3s, he has a cellphone in his pocket. He is 161 years young, and he can adapt.

But he stands on the hillside looking over Mystic Falls, and he wonders at all the _people. _The town lights up beneath him, glowing in the dusk, and half his forests are gone. Staggered houses stretch across the land like the bones of some great dead wyrm.

It is too unfamiliar; for a dizzying moment, he forgets why he came.

(Except there's a grassy drop just to the left, an old and familiar fall of rocks where he remembers climbing as a child: the boulders were higher than Stefan was tall. Damon sat at the top, legs dangling; he laughed, _If you can't keep up, you can't come. _Still, he pulled Stefan over the very last impossible rise; they shared a crumbling biscuit from Damon's pocket, and a bit of sharp cheese. Damon's eyes had the shine of winter ice.)

There's spray paint flaking on the rocks, now, yellow and red: SKOOL SUX, FUCK YOU, EG+MD. But the scent of pine sap is the same.

Stefan exhales. He thinks he catches movement from the corner of his eye. When he looks, he sees only a flurried black scatter of crows.

VI.

_On the great plain, Tashka and Walo raced. In the forest, they hunted.  
>They sang to the wolves and the buffalo; their spears were strong and swift<br>in their hands. But when the sun rose, its brilliance seared their eyes;  
>they ceased their chase and stared upward, song forgotten.<br>And when the sun moved across the sky, they could not help but follow._

Stefan doesn't know what he's doing.

Elena has Katherine's smile with none of Katherine's cruelty. She is a thousand mysteries; she is a child with great sad eyes. He is not always certain which of them is too old for the other.

She says to him once, "Come to me." She is all girlish coyness, a pencil winding in the ends of her hair, and he cannot bear to tell her whose voice she has stolen.

The pencil drops. "What's wrong?"

He shrugs; she slides her arms around him. Her skin is warm and her heartbeat is a thrum all through her flesh.

When he chokes back the hunger inside, she touches her finger to his lips, and does not flinch.

A door slams, somewhere down the hall.

_Damon, _thinks Stefan, and he feels Elena shift, but it doesn't matter.

He is breathing in the spiced scent of her hair.

.

Damon doesn't know what Stefan is doing.

There's a slip of a girl wearing Katherine like an ill-fitting costume, and she's in his house, and she isn't his. She's the ghost that will not leave him be.

Sometimes when she smiles, he wants to slap her.

But once, when she is perched on the couch and he is drinking by the window, she says, "I'm sorry about Katherine. What she did to you."

He is caught off guard; he can do nothing but turn his head and stare.

"It's just," continues Elena, shrugging, "She sounds like a colossal bitch."

Damon barks a laugh, but then Stefan's car is rolling in the driveway and Elena's whole face lights up.

On her way to the door, she touches Damon's arm.

He could scream.

VII.

_Each day Cain rose and went into the fields, tilling at the coarse soil;  
>his back was weary and his hands were torn, but<br>the stalks around him grew high and strong, and the ground  
>was watered with the salt sweat of his skin. He harvested<br>the best of his grains, and laid a feast. But his father's smile  
>fell only on the roast Abel had prepared.<em>

Stefan takes all of Damon's women.

Damon stands on the terrace, glass in hand, and he thinks about that for a while. He has time; he has a tumbler full of smooth whisky, and the stars are so bright that his undead eyes can see the colours at the heart of each tiny light.

Behind him, he hears the chatter from the library: papers rustling, voices low. He hears Stefan say, "Elijah," and he ignores it.

In his head, Katherine is whispering, "Stefan."

Just behind the glass-paned door, Elena murmurs, "Stefan."

(There is another voice, too, the one he seldom thinks about: a woman's soft tones, barely remembered. _Stefan_, she cooed, to the baby in her arms, but her lullabies were marked with a gurgled cough and the new, fragile tearing of her insides.)

Damon lifts the glass to his lips, and tosses burning oblivion down his throat. The wind tonight tastes of mud and gasoline.

"Hey," says his brother, from the door, "We could use your help in here."

Stefan is clean-cut and eminently reasonable, these days. Like he'd never held an infant's wet liver in his hands.

Damon turns, with his sharpest smile, and says, "Rub my lamp, then. What _would _you do without me?"

He leaves the glass glittering on the stone balustrade.

VIII.

_Osiris and Isis ruled in golden light; they were much beloved,  
>and there was no ill in their hearts. Where they walked,<br>the people sang hymns of joy. But at the edges,  
>in the shadows, Set lurked in sullen anger, and<br>Osiris did not know his brother's soul._

Stefan is tired of Damon's games.

"Whose blood is that?" he demands, when his brother comes through the door. He means it to be angry, but he can hear the resignation in his own voice.

"My new look? Is it too much? Be honest." Damon is too fastidious to be smeared in rot; he's already stripping the black shirt off, peeling it from pale skin. He balls the stiffening cotton in his hands, heading for the staircase.

"Seriously," says Stefan. He rises from the couch, setting notes aside; Damon is already three steps up from the landing.

"What?" Damon stops, half-turning to look down; his tone is bland but his gaze is an angry blue flare. "Are we judging, now?"

"You can't just –"

"I didn't kill anyone." The smile on Damon's lips is like a knife's edge, slicing and gone. "Tonight. Not, to be absolutely clear here, that it's any of your business."

Damon turns away; he's almost to the second floor before Stefan bites out, "She thinks you're _tame_."

The white shoulders flinch, struck. For a beat, both brothers are still; Stefan stares up at Damon's back, and Damon stares at the empty air. But then Damon says, "I could say the same for you," and he tosses the wadded, crusting shirt back downstairs.

Stefan catches it – he is _always_ cleaning up Damon's mess – and the cold damp fabric crushes between his palms.

He is overwhelmed by the sweet rich scent of human life. Sticky crimson spreads across his skin, settles in the folds of his fingers.

He takes one unsteady step backward, and lets the crumpled shirt drop.

"Mind the hardwood_,_" chides Damon; he leans on the railing, flashes a crooked, too-bright grin. When he vanishes upstairs, his voice drifts back. "And don't worry, Stefan. The next time I kill her brother, I'll be sure to make it stick."

Stefan stands motionless in the hall, and feels the long incisors slide against his gums. He does not dare to breathe.

IX.

_Their war was outside time; Child-of-the-Waters and  
>Killer-of-Enemy-Gods fought back to back,<br>never tiring, for their wills were inviolate and  
>the monsters they were born to slay were ancient and unyielding.<em>

The wolf barrels from the trees, snarling, and there is no time for talk. Stefan ducks, darting to the side so -

- Damon can get a better line for a kick while -

- Stefan reaches for the dagger in his jeans and -

- Damon slams into fur and corded muscle, leaps back from raking claws as -

- Stefan stabs, sharp and brutal, feels the wolfsbane-soaked blade make smoking contact -

- so when the beast writhes, Damon's hand drives straight between its ribs, snapping bone, wrapping cold and hard around the still-beating heart -

- until it isn't beating anymore.

They stand there, shoulders heaving, and size each other up; it is a quick look, an instant's mutual head-to-toe. Damon reaches gory fingers to check a rent in Stefan's coat; finding nothing, he waggles his eyebrows and wipes his hand instead, leaving dark wet prints on his brother's sleeve.

Lycanthrope blood smells like bile and cayenne. Stefan tolerates the desecration of his jacket without comment; he is staring at the were.

Damon puffs air between his lips. "Just once, I'd like a _friendly _stray. Lassie. The Littlest Hobo. Timmy's down the well."

"Yeah." Stefan crouches to clean his knife on matted fur. "Nice to be home, huh?"

The sound Damon makes is something between a chortle and a sigh.

X.

_Nasatya and Dasra came when invoked. They slipped  
>through legend; theirs was the granting<br>of strength, the heralding of the dawn.  
>Those in distress had but to speak their names.<em>

Elena wakes screaming.

Damon is in the room before she can fill her lungs again, and it doesn't matter that it's Stefan's room or that Stefan has his arms wrapped around her in a far-too-intimate tangle of blankets and long limbs.

Someone needs to check the windows, so that's what Damon does; there's early morning creeping over the lawn, and fading starlight.

He turns, meets Stefan's frantic gaze, shakes his head minutely.

Only then is it important that Stefan has an armful of shuddering girl. There are little bears printed on her shirt.

Damon feels something tic in his jaw, and he edges a step toward the door, but Elena shoots out her hand. He takes it on instinct; her clammy fingers lock hard around his. He would warm them if he could. Elena, with her body pressed to Stefan and her arm in Stefan's ribs and her face in Stefan's shoulder.

_Here come the waterworks, _he thinks, except he's wrong, because she's not that kind of girl.

His life would be so much easier if she were.

She says, muffled but with mostly steady anger, "I fall. Every time. He can't do that, can he? He can't be in my head."

"No." Stefan's hand is rubbing at Elena's back. He looks at the grip she has on Damon; he looks at Damon. His gaze goes flat and barren; Damon can feel his own stare turn hard.

But Damon nods, and Stefan says nothing, and three seconds later Elena lets go anyway, crushing both hands against Stefan's spine. "Okay," she breathes. And, "Sorry."

"Yeah, well. Keep it down in here." Damon reaches down, tugs Elena's ponytail, and steps again toward the door. This time he doesn't pause. "Some of us are trying to drink."

She maybe laughs, but it's buried in the side of his brother's neck.

XI.

_They brought him Castor bound on a white steed, blood streaking  
>the shining armour, blood running down the creased saddle.<br>They brought him Castor who could no longer stand. Pollux raised his arms  
>to the sky and cried out to the unfeeling gods. "Take me," he bellowed,<br>"Take me and leave my brother be." There was power in him;  
>lightning flashed, and the heavens listened.<em>

"Come to me," says Klaus, and, "Drink." Klaus has a voice like fraying velvet, soft and warm and old.

Stefan's jaw works, rigid, but he cannot stop the way he leans forward. His hands are on the blood bag; his tongue runs across his lower lip. His body betrays him.

"I hope," murmurs Klaus, "all this is worth it." His hand brushes Stefan's hair – as though Stefan were a dog, or some favoured pet. He is surprisingly gentle. "I mean – don't get me wrong," he adds. "It's certainly worth it to _me._"

Stefan thinks of Elena's dark eyes, and Damon's wicked, wry grin. He thinks of blood. He sinks his fangs into thick plastic, and sucks. His throat works and works, and he cannot stop.

It tastes like home.

.

"We'll find him," grits Elena, and Damon can do nothing but nod. His hands are locked on the table's edge; his arm is throbbing.

"We'll track," he agrees. "It'll have to be fast. They'll –"

The room makes a strange, whirling motion around him, and Elena's somehow moved across the floor, her palm against his face. "Hey," she says; her mouth is drawn tight. She has no worry left to spare.

He grimaces against her hand. "Stefan Tag-a-long," he mutters. "Stefan the idiot. This is such unbelievable bullshit." Fury is a thousand rocks pounding his skull.

She swallows; her forehead drops against his shoulder, and just for a moment, they are quiet.

He is breathing in the spiced scent of her hair.

XII.

_Polynices and Eteocles fought in Thebes, for anguish and for pride. They struck, fast as vipers,  
>but neither could prevail, for they were of one blood and one heart.<br>The sun rose and set; the moon crossed the sky. There was no truce and no respite._

_When their great swords lay shattered and their armour was twisted  
>and broken on the field, they set their hands around each other's throats<br>and squeezed until the bones cracked.  
><em>


End file.
